New Office RTMs with a New Developer Experience

The Office engineering team signed off on the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build. The new release spans the full family of Office applications, servers and cloud services. The new Office has a fresh, touch friendly design that works beautifully on Windows 8 and unlocks modern scenarios in social, reading, note-taking, meetings and communications. See HERE for more info.

New Developer Experience in Office

The new Office features a new and enhanced developer experience for Office and SharePoint. In making the enhancements the team were committed to making our platform more open and flexible. With the new cloud app model, we have embraced web standards and technologies to transition our platform to the cloud, and become more connected and accessible:

Services & APIs – A key goal around all apps is that they run across multiple platforms and devices, which is why we’re focused completely on standard web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, CSS, REST, OAuth, and OData. Long term, our goal is that apps surface on all of your devices, and are backed by the rich set of Office 365 services.

Distribution & Lifecycle – We made a huge investment in making it as easy as possible to deploy and manage apps. There are no heavy installation steps required, and your apps will roam with you. We’ll also handle the transactions for app purchases, so as a developer, it’s very easy to build and publish an app to our store and immediately start getting paid as customers acquire your app.

Tools & Learning – The application model is built around the cloud and web technologies, so of course we wanted to make sure the tooling experience was the same. Thanks to the investments the Visual Studio team has made in the "Napa" app, you can start building apps today directly from your web browser, and never need to install any client bits if you don’t want to. Access has also been re-invented, so that it’s now the easiest way for a non-developer to build and publish a cloud based app for SharePoint. We’ve invested in dev.office.com to get people started building quickly, prioritizing code snippets and examples over deep reference documentation